Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Farah and the Coming — and Mythical — Persecution

Joseph Farah is predictably upset about the Supreme Court’s marriage equality rulings and he’s making sure all his followers know that the federal government will probably start rounding them up and throwing them into FEMA reeducation camps any minute now.

What’s next?

It’s obvious, isn’t it?

The Supreme Court virtually declared an open season on those with whom the 5-4 majority disagree.

We are no longer relevant. What we think no longer counts. We are, after all, bigots who only want to demean homosexuals.

So when does the persecution begin?

When are we stripped of our citizen status, the right to vote, the right to bear arms and other constitutionally guaranteed liberties? Isn’t that next?

If not, why not?

You mean like all the racists who threw an almost identical fit, with identical arguments, when a unanimous court in Loving v Virginia similarly ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were motivated by the same kind of bigotry that motivates Farah and his pals today? Wait, you mean we haven’t stripped racists of their citizenship or their right to vote? We haven’t dragged racist pastors out of their pulpits and thrown them in prison for preaching the Hamitic theory of race? We haven’t forced churches to perform interracial marriages? Huh. How about that? A rational person would probably consider that evidence against Farah’s hysterical predictions of persecution that will never come. But evidence is irrelevant to such claims of martyrdom, just as it has always been irrelevant to the wildly inaccurate predictions of the paranoid right.

Comments

When are we stripped of our citizen status, the right to vote, the right to bear arms and other constitutionally guaranteed liberties? Isn’t that next?

I sometimes wonder why the hell they think that they are in this kind of danger. Then I remember that they fully expect their elected officials to go after their opponents in exactly this manner if and when they come to power; with no conception of equal liberty or democracy or basic fairness, I guess it’s easy to see how they wouldn’t be able to recognize these in others.

C’mon, you’ve got to give them something! Can we at least have HomoSWAT teams busting in to churches and breaking up weddings, like the one at First Baptist of Citytown (2128 Roland St, on July 6th at 2pm), with enough tear gas so that the groom can escape? No reason.

Combine this theme with how they leap to the defense of anyone who gets publicly criticized, shamed, or shunned for saying homophobic things, and I’d say one of the big things they’re really fighting against is the idea that their speech and actions can have social consequences they don’t like. The whole persecution complex is adding false equivalence in a shoddy attempt at propaganda. Unfriend someone from your social network when you find out they said something bigoted? Nazi! They’re entitled to associate with you, whether you like it or not! Or so they imply.

They want to go back to the bad old days when most people were apathetic or too intimidated to speak out against their injustice. They want to go back to the days when it was easy to earn the illusion of respect.

Of course, there’s also the previously mentioned hypothesis that they’re projecting their own disregard for liberty and morality onto us. They simply can’t comprehend the idea that some people will restrain themselves for the sake of a moral principle. They can’t comprehend why there are some things we won’t do to an enemy. To them, moral principles (or, rather, the one-sided imitations they use) are just a convenient bludgeon to use exclusively against the enemy, not something to be applied universally.

Actually, given SCOTUS’s recent dismembering of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that racism is apparently over-troglodytes like Joseph are actually more relevant in electoral terms than they were before because of the very court he’s bellyaching about!

Wait, you mean we haven’t stripped racists of their citizenship or their right to vote?

They have to share a country with a black president now, and self-styled vigilantes killing a black teen run the risk of ending up in the defendant box: as you should know: bigots start feeling oppressed the second they lose the privilege to oppress someone else.

What is most amazing is how the denizens of Wingnut World keep falling for this stuff.
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All this sort of howling at the moon was going on before and just after the 2008 presidential election. None of the predictions of Obamageddon came true, yet the same hysterical preachers are still preaching it and the choir is still buying. Guys like Farah have the same standards of fact as supermarket tabloids and, to judge by their endurance, the same accountability to their audience.
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The people of Wingnut World don’t care if it’s true; they just want to see the picture of the alien baby Kenyan antichrist in the White House.

You mean like all the racists who threw an almost identical fit, with identical arguments, when a unanimous court in Loving v Virginia similarly ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were motivated by the same kind of bigotry that motivates Farah and his pals today?

Actually, to be fair, there was remarkably little outcry against Loving when it was finally handed down. They’d kinda already preemptively lost their shit with Brown, for much the same reason.

You know, I’ve wanted a time machine for a lot of different reasons over the years. Right now I’d love one so that the next time someone pulls this shit I could say, “Oh no. Come, step into my time machine. We’re going to 1930’s Russia.”
ziiiip
“Right, now say something unpopular and you will see *real* persecution. Briefly. Then you will no longer have officially existed.”

What is most amazing is how the denizens of Wingnut World keep falling for this stuff

That’s a very common misconception: the WND readers are not idiots who keep falling from obvious lies: they’re Larpers: they want to feel the rush of adrenaline and dopamine that comes with the conviction of being a righteous rogue fighting against tyranny as well as a way to make their desire to crush everyone under their feet more presentable.

The greatest success of the far-right is not making their followers believe wild lies: it’s making everyone else believe that their followers really believe their wild lies.

“Whoa, Pornstache Joe finally got outed; one of those “gay for pay” vids he made with the original “Dirty (Matt) Sanchez was discovered. along with the original screen play*, in Dick Cheney’s old desk at one of his “undisclosed locations”.

When I discovered it was just a “teaser”, inadvertent though it might have been, I had a sad.

* LOTS of “highlighter” on that puppy. Scrawled note in corner of one page sez, “Gotta try this one with Jeff Gannon, after the surgeon clears me to resume “normal activities”)